=Week 3= The Popularity Contest
This week I wanted to take a look at who the most popular commander is for the rebels and imperials and see if that has changed over time. I have about 2 weeks of data of some of the new commanders but choose to exclude them as they represented a very small fraction of the total and still less than 5% for the time that they have been around.
If you missed prior posts check them out below
=Week 1= The Beginning and a Look at Squadrons
++Side Note of Fun++
For those of you waiting patiently from week 1 about how many of Armada Warlord lists have checked the Tournament box it is 1084.
++End Side Note of Fun++
What this analysis is…
This is me looking for trends in the way people build lists. It includes roughly 30,000 lists that have been created since November 2015 through half of June 2016. I scrubbed the data to only look at lists built for 400 points with a bid of no more than 35 points; as I considered anything lower than that an incomplete list as opposed to an aggressive bid for initiative.
This should be treated as another data point similar to what Smmitty has gathered and analyzed from regional tournaments. In fact he is the inspiration for this. After reading his blog post, I thought about how we could expand the sample size to look at the global meta. The next step was thinking of a way to get that data. After about a day of trying to figure out a way to create a program that would scrape the data from list building websites I had the great idea to just ask… 30 minutes later I had all the data I could possibly want.
Rebels
Looking at rebels first, I was really surprised at the results. While I expected Ackbar to win this beauty pageant I didn’t expect him to crush the competition the way he did. Taking all lists into account there is an almost 50/50 shot that you will face Ackbar in rebel builds. Those are huge numbers. After that it seems to be an even split between the commanders that are trailing with the exception of poor Garm. No love for the Garm, which was another surprise given his cost I have been a fan of him in the past.
Next I wanted to see the trend over time. Thankfully over the past year Ackbar has been steadily losing ground but he has only been losing that ground to Rieekan. It seems a lightbulb clicked in the meta and suddenly Rieekan has been gaining steam ever since.
Imperials
Looking at the imperials, it’s a two way tie between Screed and Motti representing 2/3 of the lists out there. The remaining 1/3 was evening split between Ozzel, Tarken, and Vader. Not too big of a surprise to me. I really like how on the imperial side isn’t dominated by 1 commander like the rebels, but to be far this should change with the addition of more choices.
Looking over time it was interesting to see that Motti started strong and has only gotten stronger as time progressed. Another interesting note is the steady decline of Vader. With Vader making a very respectable appearance at regionals I did not expect this. Other than Motti and Vader the trends appear remarkably flat.
Let me know your thoughts and if this fit with what you have seen in your local metas. Until next time… happy gaming.